Trump Shifting Authority Over Military Operations Back to Pentagon

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President Trump with Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, his new national security adviser, last month. General McMaster is shifting the National Security Council’s focus from military operations and tactics to strategic issues.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump is shifting more authority over military operations to the Pentagon, according to White House officials, reversing what his aides and some generals say was a tendency by the Obama White House to micromanage issues better left to military commanders.

The change is at the heart of a re-engineering of the National Security Council’s role under its new leader, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, and reflects Mr. Trump’s belief that the N.S.C. should focus less on military operations and tactics and more on strategic issues. A guiding precept for the president and his team is that the balance of power in the world has shifted against American interests, and that General McMaster should focus on developing foreign and economic policy options in concert with the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies to respond to that challenge.

The new approach to managing military operations was evident this month when a Marine artillery battery and a team of Army Rangers — some 400 troops in all — arrived in northern Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis signed off on the deployments and notified the White House. But General McMaster neither convened a meeting at the White House to discuss whether to send the forces nor presented the Pentagon with questions about where, precisely, the troops would operate or what risks they might confront.

Though the streamlined decision-making has been welcomed by many in the military, it could raise questions about whether Mr. Trump, who has drawn heavily from current and former generals to fill key jobs in his administration, is exercising sufficient oversight.

“For President Trump, it is very early days, but he appears to be going back to a model of greater delegation of authority,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, who was the Pentagon’s top policy official under President Barack Obama and is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based policy group.

“The benefit is that it allows the military campaign to go forward without undue pauses, interruptions or delays,” Ms. Flournoy added. “That enables it to create more momentum and to be more responsive to changes on the battlefield. But there is a risk if there is inadequate oversight and the president stops paying close attention. It can be detrimental, even dangerous, if a commander in chief does not feel ownership of the campaign or loses touch with how things are evolving on the ground.”

Mr. Trump has already drawn criticism for being quick to approve the military’s plans to carry out a raid in Yemen in January that led to the death of one American commando and at least several civilians. The United States also conducted an airstrike last week in Syria that the American military said killed dozens of Qaeda fighters but that local activists said hurt civilians.

At the same time, Mr. Trump has yet to announce a new strategy to defeat the Islamic State, something he repeatedly said during the presidential campaign that he would do. That suggests that Mr. Trump’s main contribution may be to ensure that the basic strategy he inherited is carried out more quickly.

General McMaster — who replaced a retired general, Michael T. Flynn, whose tumultuous tenure as national security adviser lasted less than a month — has a reputation as a strategic thinker. So far, he has not undertaken any fundamental restructuring of the N.S.C., according to White House officials who did not want to be identified because they were discussing internal planning. But he has made some appointments to assist in the effort to forge a new strategy.

Nadia Schadlow, a former Pentagon official and the author of a recent book that examined cases in which the United States Army intervened abroad, was hired to draft a security strategy. In the past, that document has often been little more than a rehash of the White House’s policies, but for a Trump administration struggling to translate its promise to “make America great again” into a coherent foreign and economic agenda, it might emerge as an important statement.

How General McMaster will navigate rival centers of power within the White House that have their own deep-seated views on security policy remains to be seen. When Mr. Mattis hosted the Saudi defense minister at the Pentagon on Thursday, General McMaster was one of five White House officials who attended the meeting. The others were Stephen K. Bannon, who remains a full member of the National Security Council’s “principals” committee; Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law; Ms. Powell; and Derek Harvey, the chief Middle East expert on the N.S.C. staff.

“General McMaster’s problem is not how to deal with defense secretary and other principals; it is how to deal with the many competing powers in the White House,” said Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the co-author of a book on the National Security Council. “That was underscored when five senior White House officials traipsed over to the Pentagon for a meeting that normally might be attended by a single N.S.C. aide.”

An immediate focus for General McMaster, however, is making good on Mr. Trump’s vow during his speech to a joint session of Congress last month to “demolish and destroy” the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Trump, who claimed during the campaign to have a secret plan to defeat the militant group, instructed the Pentagon and other key agencies in late January to submit a preliminary plan within 30 days to do so.

More than seven weeks later, no new strategy has been announced, and there has been some speculation that the White House will not decide one key question — whether to arm the Kurdish Y.P.G. militia in Syria — until after a Turkish referendum on April 16 on whether to expand the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While American commanders generally believe that the militia would greatly help what is expected to be a hard-fought operation to take Raqqa, Syria, the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State, Turkey has denounced the group as a terrorist organization.

The steps the Trump administration has taken so far, such as deploying Marine artillery in Syria, generally reflect the Obama administration’s approach of providing firepower and advisers so local forces can do the main fighting on the ground.

But while it still expects the White House to be consulted, the Trump administration is prepared to give the Pentagon more leeway in deploying forces than the Obama administration did. The Obama White House’s scrutiny of military deployments reflected its fear of being drawn into a quagmire, as well as strains with the military that went back to 2009 deliberations over Afghanistan strategy.

While the approach the Obama administration took ensured that the president was well-informed on military details, it also meant that modest steps, such as resupplying arms to Syrian fighters battling the Islamic State or sending military teams to scout out a potential base in Iraq, often could not be taken without time-consuming deliberations.

“In defense of the Obama administration, every single time we went to the president and asked for something more, we eventually got it, though we often had to jump through a lot of hoops,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who held a senior position at the Defense Department under Mr. Obama. “The episode that took the cake was toward the end of the administration, when we literally had cabinet secretaries debating the movement of three helicopters from Iraq to Syria.”

While it remains unclear whether the new administration will come up with a strategy significantly different from its predecessor’s, the Trump team may have an effect on how the one it inherited is carried out.

“Potentially, by giving field commanders more leeway to exploit opportunities on the battlefield, the Trump administration can execute the Obama administration’s strategy more efficiently,” Mr. Exum said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Adopting Hands-Off Style Toward Military. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe